Scott Kelby’s “10 Things I Would Tell New Lightroom Users”
Scott Kelby, president of the National Association of Photoshop Professionals, posted an article recently that might help Lightroom beginners. If you are new to Lightroom, I encourage you to read his “10 Things I Would Tell New Lightroom Users” in addition to browsing all of the articles in our Getting Started Tutorials section.
I should add that I agree with all of Scott Kelby’s points, except where he suggests using multiple catalogs. On this, we must respectfully disagree.
In my opinion, most photographers, especially folks new to the Lightroom Catalog paradigm, need to create one single catalog for all of their digital images. My experience teaching thousands has convinced me that using multiple catalogs is counter-productive, and that it only creates unnecessary confusion. Despite this minor disagreement, I sure am grateful to Scott Kelby, and to the NAPP, for all of their educational efforts.
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About the Author: David’s sports and landscape images are often used on the web and in outdoor sports publications. He has an extensive knowledge of digital photography and is an Adobe Certified Expert in Photoshop and Adobe Photoshop Lightroom. David is a talented instructor and his entertaining teaching style works for students of all skill levels.
In 2009, David Marx led digital photography programs for the 
The single catalog only makes sense for certain types of photography. For people who do weddings, it does not make much sense for example.
Hi,
this one’s causing me a headache as well. The only reason I am pro multi catalog is performance. I _am_ confused sometimes where a particular picture is, but even with my limited (5000-6000) number of pictures per catalog gives my trusty laptop (2 GHz Lenovo T61 w 4 GiG RAM running x64 Win7&LR) a panic attack.
Funny – As a new LR user way back when, I used one big catalog, but have now split it into two. One for my travel photography, and another for everything else.
I understand the benefits of a single catalog, but so long as you take on board the restraints there’s nothing wrong with multiple catalogs.
That said, Not sure I’ve want more than a couple.
Horses for courses I guess!
In my experience, where having multiple LR catalogs will get you into trouble is when you want to filter and/or create collections that include ALL your photos – can’t be done because filtering and using/creating collections is all done within a catalog. So, if you’ve got a catalog for each of your wedding shoots, for instance, and you want to create a collection of ALL of your five-star wedding shots, you can’t!
I’m using a 4+ year old laptop and have a single LR catalog for all of my images (about 15,000 I think), and I can’t say that I’ve got a big performance issue because of having just one catalog . . .
But I agree with Nick when he says that as long as you understand that you can’t do filtering/collections across multiple catalogs, go ahead and use multiple catalogs.
Hello Friends,
Here’s another “top ten things to learn” list from Lightroom expert John Beardsworth. This one is also well worth your time.
10 Things I Wish I Could Tell a Slightly Less New Lightroom User
On a personal note, I am delighted to see that he agrees with me about the potential headaches multiple catalogs can create for both novice and experienced Lightroom users.
I am also delighted with Mr. Beardsworth second point: “Unless you really know what you’re doing, never use Explorer or Finder for moving or renaming files that are catalogued in Lightroom” since I recorded a tutorial on this very topic just a few months ago. You can see my tutorial on Moving Folders within Adobe Photoshop Lightroom here.
John, I am in complete agreement. I also am a Lightroom trainer and I always recommend to new users that they star with a single catalog to minimize confusion. While I can understand why a wedding photographer (or any pro for that matter) would want to segment jobs into seperate catalogs, I strongly believe anyone doing this loses the real benefit of having all their photographs in one place, having the ability to find and filter images rapidly. What happens when the photographer with multiple catalogs wants to collect images for a portfolio, for example? Or, think about the process of searching multiple catalogs for a single image – isn’t that potential for a real performance hit? I am a strong believer in the “one big bucket” method for storing my photographs and using collections to segment them, and with 80K+ images, I am not seeing a performance problem with Lightroom, and I am excited to see the new performance capabilities of version 3.
Phil Nelson